Lit Hub Weekly: July 1 – 3, 2019

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TODAY: In 1865, first issue of The Nation is published.

“I know our past, and I know our pain.” Maurice Carlos Ruffin on being a patriotic Black southerner. | Lit Hub
Nadifa Mohamed and Aleksandar Hemon: a conversation on what it means to be displaced. | Lit Hub
For PEN America, Jhumpa Lahiri, Hari Kunzru, and more reflect on what it means to celebrate the 4th of July in the middle of a migrant crisis. | Lit Hub, PEN America
Rachel Cusk on Yiyun Li, Deborah Eisenberg on Natalia Ginzburg, a graphic novel 20 years in the making, and more of the Reviews You Need to Read This Week. | Book Marks
“Noir storytelling, with its cynicism, extensive plots, well-thought-out backstory, and quiet existential philosophy, is well-suited for the present times.” Akanksha Singh on the rise of Bollywood noir. | Crime Reads
“I was struck, again, at how work can become such a yoke for a black man.” Edward P. Jones on rereading James Alan McPherson’s Hue and Cry. | The Paris Review
“Her work is so consistently surprising that reading it is something like being confronted with a brilliant child, innocent in the sense of being uncorrupted by habit, instruction, or propriety.” Deborah Eisenberg on Natalia Ginzburg. | The New York Review of Books
50 years after Stonewall, Brown University’s John Hay Library has proven to be a shrine (and scholarly goldmine) to gay pulp fiction from the last half of the 20th century, boasting more than 5,000 paperbacks. | 90.9 WBUR
“I do not know how to write a book.” Chuck Wendig on this and other lessons learned while writing his latest novel, Wanderers. | Terribleminds
“Krantz’s books are often dismissed as trash, but as any archeologist will tell you, there are few resources so valuable for reconstructing a historical era as a nicely overflowing dump.” Why Judith Krantz was the most important writer of the 20th century. | Jezebel
From Beloved to As I Lay Dying, the peculiar literary history of bedridden women. | AL.com
Meet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, “founding mother of Mexican literature.” | JSTOR Daily
From Mori Ōgai to Masaoka Shiki: a brief history of Meiji era literature in Japan, which saw the rise of realist, colloquial styles in poetry and fiction. | Nippon
“The difference between sharing and watching might almost be a definition of the difference between good writing and bad. In the case of Yiyun Li, this principle appears to be not only reversed but also turned inside out.” Rachel Cusk on Yiyun Li. | The New York Review of Books
“I am a serious reader. I read everything.” On the life-changing magic of giving up on literary snobbery. | Financial Times
“All this Audenization of the Great Books relieves those books of the burden of being monuments and lets them breathe.” On the joys of teaching The Auden Course in Oklahoma. | The Hedgehog Review
“How is it possible that the United States has fallen so far from its moral standing to treat children and babies with such violence?” Washington’s poet laureate on the trauma of immigrant children. | The Seattle Times

Also on Lit Hub:

“To Mary Frances, food was a metaphor for living.” Ruth Reichl on M.F.K. Fisher’s lifetime of joyous eating • On Peter Matthiessen’s lifelong fascination with Bigfoot • Gabriel Urza on what fiction writers can learn from magicians • On what you can find mushroom hunting in Central Park • Peter Hessler: In Cairo, the garbage collector knows everything • Barbara Bourland on value and excess in the art market • Janet Messineo on the obsession that follows losing a big fish • Mamta Chaudhry on five novels narrated by ghosts • We may not know if Mercury is in Retrograde (no—but maybe?), but we do know what you should read this month, based on your Zodiac sign, plus Lit Hub contributors recommend ten books you should read in July